Memory

And here comes the next in series of my weird theories. So I had just started watching this movie called "Sorority Wars" and within the first five minutes I started thinking. A scene sequence shows the mom of the female lead reminiscing on the stage about her time in the college. Which made me think about how we store memories and recollect them. Being a software engineer I of course looked upto my IT vocab to explain the phenomenon.
So we say that brain stores memories, facts and directs the actions etc. I would call the brain a CPU and maybe in a later blog entry go on about it in more detail but right now just wanted to talk about the memories part. So i started wondering how do we reminisce. We reminisce when we see something. Even if we were not looking for those memories they come back flooding. Objectifying this I would think in database terms that if u are looking for some data a lot of other data that was not needed comes flooding. And with that comes more data and more and more until you just cant handle that much or give attention to something else. This is what we call the train of thought. In IT terms it seems to be a query that continuously runs on the params it finds till it has the CPUs attention. The only way to stop the flood of data is to divert the CPUs attention.
Now as per one of my great teachers', A mind is like a filing cabinet.. Each memory is like a file and if you have too many files the cabinet starts getting cluttered.
When I think the same in IT terms it's like a huge relational database. Rather something like an object oriented relational database. You have objects and you have properties. Objects can be anything or anyone. A person, a picture, a car, a location everything is an object as well as a property. So if you are thinking about a person, all the properties related to the object get loaded into your mind. Birthdate, locations where you met, common persons you know which infact leads you to a memory of the person. Now the memory can either be the latest or it could be the one with the most hits(something which we call "etched in our memory"). With the memory comes more attributes and hence the train of thought continues.
It's something like some of the music sites now offer. You like something and it will look up the genre, artist, album etc and then recommend other songs with similar properties. Similar is the memory structure. Just many times bigger and many times more complex. I don't know what my point of writing the blog was. Just that I thought something and so I put it down. :)

Ram Setu - Decoded

I sometimes just love how wild my train of thought runs. This morning I was listening to the song Dhan Te Nan from the movie "Kaminey". One of the lines in it says "Koi chaal aisi chalo yaar abke samandar bhi pul pe chale, phir tu chale uspe ya mein chalun shehar ho apne pairon tale" listening to it I imagined the sea water flooding over the bridge and two people walking over the water. :P

Anyways from there my mind wandered off to the concept of water-walking and the first instance of people doing that - "The Ram Setu"

And I thought how can people be so naive as to believe that it was a miracle. But then stones floating in water can do that to people. However u also need to keep in mind that Nal and Neel were engineers and engineers do a lot of cool stuff!! :P

Nyways now as they were engineers they are bound to have a good knowledge of physics. And hence would know that if air is trapped within a shell of silica it would look like a stone but would actually be very light and would thus float.

Pumice is one such stone that floats on water. Infact as a recent example, after the explosion of Krakatoa near Indonesia Pumice rafts were seen floating for over upto 20 years. So that resolves the mystery of floating stones. But from where did so much Pumice come? Not sure how many of u know this but the Andaman & Nicobar Islands contain three big ancient volcanoes. One of which is Active even today. And the prime source of pumice is... Yup u guessed it right.. Volcanoes. So during the volcanic eruptions from those volcanoes pumice must've formed and floated to the coast of TN. Lucky for our heroes rt.

Half the mystery is solved. But then there's another rumour that it was the name of Ram that made the stone float. From a layman's perspective if I would've seen that I would go and tell : "They wrote something on the stone and the stone floated!!!" But here's a perfectly reasonable explanation. There were just two engineers who knew the difference between what'll float and what'll not. So how do they make the labourers know which stone to use and which not to use? Simple.. write something on it to differentiate.

And rest as they say was a miracle so big that people today are ready to cut each other's throats for it.

Note: This also explains why the Ram Setu is under water today. Pumice doesn't float forever. :)